For Cleveland’s maligned police department, the barrage began with a car chase that ended when officers fired 137 rounds and killed two unarmed black people.

Then late last year, a white, rookie police officer shot and killed a 12-year-old black boy carrying a pellet gun in a park. Around the same time, a U.S. Justice Department report slammed the entire department, outlining a string of excessive force and civil rights violations.

Somehow, despite the repeated stains, Cleveland has been spared from violent protests that have erupted in places like Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri.

Cleveland’s politicians and community leaders are now working to make sure protests remain peaceful as the city awaits a verdict in the trial of a white officer in the deaths of the two unarmed people and a decision on whether charges will be filed in the 12-year-old’s death.

There’s nothing at this point that indicates there’s a cauldron of dissent in the predominantly black, largely poor city that’s about to boil over into violence. Cleveland and the region’s biggest concern at the moment appear to be a hoped-for march by the Cleveland Cavaliers to an NBA title.

The phrasing chosen is not accidental.

Mark Gillispie and John Seewer of the Associated Press are quite intentionally making it seem almost miraculous that Cleveland hasn’t broken out in violent riots and looting, asserting that such behavior in the face of controversy is normal and expected. Their intent seems to be goading the residents of Cleveland towards violent rioting and looting.

Yellow journalism in the modern era is both more pervasive and more subtle today than it was when William Randolph Hearst and the equally reprehensible Joseph Pulitzer dueled for supremacy on the pages of the New York World and the New York Journal, but the desire to inflame and incite instead of inform is still there.

We’re seeing the same deceptive, riot-inciting behavior from Associated Press rabble-rousers involving a pair of thieves that charged a solitary law enforcement officer yesterday in Olympia, Washington, forcing him to fire in self-defense (my bold below):

Hundreds marched peacefully in Washington state’s capital city to protest a police shooting that wounded two unarmed stepbrothers suspected of trying to steal beer from a grocery store.

The officer reported he was being assaulted with a skateboard early Thursday before the shooting that left a 21-year-old man in critical condition and a 24-year-old man in stable condition. Both were expected to survive.

Yes, the Associated Press agitators are now attempting to assert that criminals using improvised weapons are “unarmed,” even when those improvised weapons clearly have the ability to wound, maim, or kill.

The same reporters were quick to sow the seeds of racial discord as well, noting that the two brothers who were shot a second time when they doubled-back to charge the officer, were black, while the officer was white.

Many of the agitators are members of the Revolutionary Communist Party (revcom.us), and seek to overthrow the United States government and impose upon us a “new” constitution.

How does this relate to us, in a Second Amendment context?

It seems increasingly obvious that the mainstream media has gone far beyond reporting on events, and is now actively attempting to incite violence. I’ll leave others to speculate on why that might be, and will instead focus on what we can do to protect our families and out neighborhoods.

If you have not done so yet, it may be a good time to get together with like-minded neighbors and put together a community defense plan to protect yourself from the sorts of failures of civility we’ve seen in Ferguson, Baltimore, and elsewhere.

While individual law enforcement officers would generally like to quell rioters and looters before they get out of hand, we’ve repeatedly seen them called to give ground and retreat by (almost always Democrat) mayors who would rather allow rioting and looting to occur than be seen as “oppressing” or “suppressing” the violent thugs, arsonists, and criminals that they’ve set loose upon good people.

You are your own first responders, folks. You will have to make the decision to defend your property or retreat in the face of the mob, knowing that police will not be allowed to support you at the time, and may be used against you for merely protecting your home and family.

Learn your local self-defense laws, game out scenarios and responses, and have a plan.